Pathfinder Career Narratives is an ongoing series tracking the career choices and experiences of doctoral graduates. You can see all of the posts in the series here. You can find all the Pathfinder resources and opportunities here. Today’s blog is written by Dr Doug Metzer, who is technical writer and the host and creator of the Literature and History podcast. You can find out more about Literature and History here.
Name: Doug Metzer
Doctorate subject area and year of completion: English, 2011
Role and employer: Podcaster & Technical Writer
Approximate salary bracket for this type of role: Technical writers in California make an average of $80k per year. My podcast earnings vary depending on production quantity.
I graduated with a BA in English from UC Berkeley in 2003. During a year off between undergrad and graduate school, I moved to Washington, D.C. to work in telecommunications for about six months. It was supposed to be a temporary gig to pay the bills. During graduate school, between 2004 and 2011, I did all the normal graduate school stuff, but also kept intermittently doing consulting work in telecom during summers and slower quarters. When I finished my PhD in 2011, I first did a postdoctoral fellowship in an English department, then a telecommunications consulting assignment in Brazil, and then an adjunct professorship at a different 4-year school. I was all over the place! In 2013, when we moved for the second time for my wife’s job, there weren’t any steady academic opportunities around, so I found a job at a small software company as a technical writer. It was a good fit, and provided a relatively stress-free work environment that allowed me to pursue various extramural academic activities, including the Literature and History podcast.
I don’t know if other academics who have left academia feel this way, but I felt like there was no “best option” for me, vocationally speaking. I would have been happy, overall, as a professor, and I wholly and without exception love academia. But even as a graduate student, I waffled between wanting an academic career and not wanting one. I love research and teaching, and writing a doctoral dissertation was one of the most tremendous and formative things I ever did. At the same time, though, I love a lot of other things, too – extramural generalist research, obviously, music, athletics, writing fiction, recording, and other fairly serious pursuits besides these. So, part of the way through graduate school, I started to feel like there was no one career that would really embody my idiosyncratic assortment of propensities and interests. I think a lot of us are like this – we are octagonal pegs in a world of square and round holes, so to speak.
It was around that time (third year, if I remember correctly), that I had my first technical writing assignment that was just – steady and manageable are the only words that come to mind. I thought, “This job is fine. It’s not very demanding or interesting. But it’s solid.” I guess it was then that I started thinking that a self and a career are a Venn diagram that is unique to each person – that you can have a job that you feel just fine about, but that doesn’t particularly embody who you are. I think being married to a Ukrainian who grew up in the former Soviet Union inspired me a little bit to think this way – there is a staunch pragmatism in a lot of Eastern Europeans I’ve met whose sense of self isn’t particularly tied to vocation. In academia, of course, we are very much personally invested in our research and careers, and so making a transition to having a job that’s just a comfortable part of who we are, rather than the embodying who we are, can be counterintuitive to PhDs going into different fields.
As far as sharing my academic career ambitions with my colleagues, there just isn’t much overlap to share. Working in tech, there isn’t a lot of interest in breakroom and lunch conversations in poetry or cultural history. At the same time, though, I think that if you find the right people, any job can be joyful. Even though I’m not having transformative conversations about Petrarch and Heidegger at the office, I have real friendships there and people whom I care about.
I have two roles, really – a technical writer and web designer on the one hand, and then a literature podcaster on the other. The latter has steadily become more demanding as my episodes have grown longer and more academically thorough, whereas the former has stayed relatively static, demanding a set block of time each week. A ‘week in the life’ is a pretty bookish and industrious one. I interact with software engineering, support, and sales teams at work, and then plenty of podcast listeners through email, social media and the phone. The work projects I have going on are standard to any technical writer – mainly documentation and website work. With the podcast, I’m beginning a season on early Islamic history, following a 50+ hour sequence of programs on Late Antiquity (c. 300-700 CE).
There’s little that I can add to this wonderful blog that hasn’t been said by other contributors. Read a few entries, and you get a sense that a lot of us who finish advanced degrees end up leaving academia for various reasons. Read a lot of entries, and you start to understand that the intellectual and logistical calisthenics of graduate school give you skills that are eminently transferrable to a lot of other vocations.
Toward the end of finishing my PhD in English, I was terrified of what was next. The idea of leaving academia and working in industry sounded a bit like Milton’s Paradise Lost – a fall from an idyllic intellectual world and into dystopian bondage to a soulless machine. During my final years in graduate school, I came down with mild stress headaches. I never had them before, and I’ve never had them again. Not knowing what one’s career is going to be, nor where, especially after the extravagant windup of undergraduate and graduate school – this is hard for anyone at the tail end of an advanced degree program.
And indeed, there are significant losses to completing a graduate degree and taking a different career path. We write our theses and dissertations due to our passions about subjects, and completing them only to leave them to gather dust in an archive is not a satisfying experience. Further, a professorship is a position with distinct advantages – summers off, vibrant coworkers, the healthy intellectual aerobics of classroom teaching, and some social cachet, too. However, there are some advantages to leaving that can be described with equal concision.
It’s nice to have a vocational role that’s easily transplantable, and not cross one’s fingers for a fortuitous listing on higheredjobs. It’s nice to able to move more easily for the sake of family, friends and wanderlust. It’s exciting to have a career that changes directions with us and our interests as we get older. It’s a joy to work with people in different fields. But there was something else I wanted to communicate, too, perhaps more unique to my experience.
In academia, we are rather strongly defined by our jobs. A chemistry professor who has always loved chemistry and runs a research lab full of graduate students – her abilities and interests and salaried position all closely align. A history professor who loved the subject growing up and is now and expert on, say Tang Dynasty China – his passions and his vocation are largely congruent. The considerable workload of academic jobs is made bearable by the fact that much of it is what faculty members want to be doing in the first place. What I wanted to say was that this is not the only way to be, and that in fact, having vocations that tidily embody our personalities and ambitions may be more of an exception than a rule.
Many lives and career paths are more prismatic in nature. Many of us have a job which is a rather neutral, compartmentalized part of our lives, alongside of which are more fulfilling things – family, friends, hobbies, projects, collaborations, and so on. Walking away from a 60-hour professorial workweek and toward a 35-hour industry workweek opens a lot of doors. When you realize that you are not your job, but instead the sum total of everything you do, finding a career after academia feels a lot less weighty, and a lot more fun and freewheeling.
The immediate aftermath of graduate school was hard. Put very briefly, I let go of my doctoral dissertation and the specialty that I’d developed. I missed being at a university. I missed classroom teaching. At the worst moments of it, I felt like my job was a pathetic non sequitur for the long years I’d spent in school. I never got too down, though. It’s hard to feel sorry for yourself when you have a job and a place to live, and vocational unrequitedness is not the world’s worst tragedy. Work continued offering me new and reasonably interesting projects. Evenings and weekends were free, always – free to go trail running and mountain biking, to get better at jazz guitar and write fiction and keep up with friends and family, and eventually, to start the Literature and History podcast. The latter project is kind of a synthesis of much of what I can do and have learned. There’s literature and cultural history, of course. There are hundreds of hours of original music in it. It’s a technical project, too, from time to time – between web design and sound design and more recently, videography, it allowed me to put a lot of my tech career skills together with my academic ones. So ultimately, my transition wasn’t too hard. Just five or six years after grad school, I was feeling quite fulfilled and learning a lot across the board. The listeners I’ve met on tours and events and just on the internet offer positive and productive feedback, and once you get a bunch of listeners tuning in across the world, you start developing a rolodex of people whom you can call when you need a specialist’s input or just a cathartic conversation.
I think I was afraid of what a lot of academics transitioning away from academia were afraid of – essentially, either outright unemployment, or working a job that made me feel I’d lost the cachet of an advanced degree. Some of it happened, too – I went from lecturing in an auditorium in the spring of 2013 to sitting in an office cubicle in the spring of 2014.
However, as I said earlier, after sitting in that office cubicle, rather than going home to grade papers and write the following day’s lecture, I drove out to the coastal range of California to go trail running, and then came home and learned new styles of music and read and wrote books that would have been imprudent to the career of an assistant professor. I learned a lot of code and began to appreciate the world of software engineering more. Don’t get me wrong – being an assistant professor at that phase of my career would have been awesome, too, but the extramural hobbies and ambitions I had were able to really blossom, and software development grew on me, too.
My only academic leadership role, so to speak, has been in the podcast. The show has a large audience, but I don’t particularly think of myself as a “leader” so much as a bridge. As a lecturer to many listeners across the world, I guess my only guiding mantras are (1) be compassionate and respectful to everyone, (2) ask for help from specialists when needed, (3) respect the audience’s time. That’s about it. I never wanted a leadership or management role. I just like making things.
The best advice that I ever received was that a lot of your career path will be decided for you, and that embracing the road ahead with an open mind can be joyous as well as uncertain and foreboding. In my own journey, there were never any agonizing moments of decision, nor dramatically forking paths. There were a series of alternatives that I strategically navigated through slowly, and in real time. The non-academic world is full of incredibly fulfilling and important careers, and extraordinary people, too. Leaving academia comes with as many benefits as it does losses.
The Auditorium: a research culture and researcher development blog 